A Room in Dodge City: A Novel-in-Vignettes
“With a draftsman’s hand and a psychonaut’s eye, David Leo Rice has mapped the alien precinct in which we already live. I’ve never encountered a book so strange yet so familiar.”
—Joanna Ruocco,
author of Dan
author of Dan
A Room in Dodge City follows a nameless drifter into an American heart of darkness. In this nightmarish version of the historic Dodge City, mythic beasts crawl out of the woodwork; bizarre rituals are enacted; and death is never the end. Equal parts humor and horror-show, David Leo Rice’s novel combines the mundaneness of modern life—motels, strip malls, temp jobs—with something stranger, darker, and more eternal. Told through linked vignettes that read like metaphoric fairytales gone wrong, Dodge City consumes the reader just as it slowly consumes the drifter, leaving all to wonder whether any of us can ever truly escape this world—or our own.
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Praise for A Room in Dodge City
“A Room in Dodge City is the beatific son who materialized from the thermals of a Lynchian desert and then drifted from town to town until finally doing time, only to be paroled on work release to save the world, not by changing your life so much as by readjusting your understanding of the life that you’ve been living. At the same time, Rice cares deeply about his characters and this comes out in every vignette. He doesn’t follow the nihilistic postmodern structure by declaring that life is meaningless or hopeless. What we do find is the presence of hope in all things, no matter how run-down they might appear on the surface.”
—Joe Halstead,
author of West Virginia
author of West Virginia
“The writing is David Lynch meets Neil Gaiman meets Samuel Beckett and the Theater of the Absurd. Just as Dodge City is a place the narrator can never leave, Rice’s book sucks you in and doesn’t let you walk out of it intact, either.”
—Nick Antosca,
author of The Girlfriend Game, Midnight Picnic, and Fires, and creator of Syfy’s Channel Zero
author of The Girlfriend Game, Midnight Picnic, and Fires, and creator of Syfy’s Channel Zero
“What might happen if Edvard Munch knew alt-folk, lived in the U.S., and decided to paint directly on the inside of his own skull rather than on canvas. A deeply odd book that still possesses enormous resonance.”
—Brian Evenson,
author of A Collapse of Horses, Windeye, and ALA-RUSA Award-winner Last Days
author of A Collapse of Horses, Windeye, and ALA-RUSA Award-winner Last Days
“Don’t enter into David Leo Rice’s terrifying and hilarious fictional multiverse looking for causality, continuity, or logic, as we know them. Do and never, really, leave. A Room in Dodge City will plunge you into a nightmarish warren-maze where somewhere, amid the numberless trapdoors, inner chambers and branching halls on branching halls, a literary orgy is going down among the imaginative intellects of Blake Butler, Kathryn Davis, Haruki Murakami, Livia Llewellyn, and Robert Coover, refereed by Cronenberg and Lynch.”
—Adrian Van Young,
author of Shadows in Summerland and The Man Who Noticed Everything
author of Shadows in Summerland and The Man Who Noticed Everything
“A Room in Dodge City is a vivid, precisely described nightmare filled with jokes for people who think nothing is funny anymore. David Leo Rice imagines American pop culture as a Hieronymus Bosch painting come to life, and he gives us a carnival barker’s tour through a disturbing landscape of lost souls, vain ambitions, and distorted identities, ultimately finding a path to redemption through the spiritual wreckage.”
—Mark Beauregard,
author of The Whale: A Love Story
author of The Whale: A Love Story
“Like Dodge City itself, David Rice’s novel has a heart of infinite evil. Rice’s imagination and wit make this journey into the deepest pits of hell much more fun than it should be. Readers shouldn’t hesitate to book a room.”
—John Dermot Woods,
author of The Baltimore Atrocities
author of The Baltimore Atrocities
“Last night in Dodge City, the zeitgeist saw its doppelgänger. Last night in Dodge City, American culture committed suicide and its pineal gland pumped DMT into the water mains. With a draftsman’s hand and a psychonaut’s eye, David Rice has mapped the alien precinct in which we already live. I’ve never encountered a book so strange yet so familiar. Writers such as William Burroughs and Samuel Delany may have helped prepare the ground, but this high-speed, controlled drift across it is all Rice’s own.”
—Joanna Ruocco,
Pushcart Prize winner and author of Dan and A Compendium of Domestic Incidents
Pushcart Prize winner and author of Dan and A Compendium of Domestic Incidents
“In his mind-boggling debut novel, David Leo Rice conjures a series of seemingly unassuming vignettes that read like a revelatory prose poem written by the Zodiac Killer; my favorite kind of literature. There’s something to be said about masks and face masks, but also, the character of The Night Crusher or, how Zodiac Killer wishes he were The Night Crusher. Wow! A Room in Dodge City is a celebration of what it means to know that you know that you can never know everything.”
—Mike Kleine,
author of Kanley Stubrick
author of Kanley Stubrick
“Unsettling and unsettled, reading David Rice’s A Room in Dodge City is like reading Jakob von Gunten’s dream journal the day after he’d stayed up late to watch High Plains Drifter and Videodrome. An impossible mix of the antic and the sinister.”
—Gabriel Blackwell,
author of Madeleine E. and The Natural Dissolution of Fleeting-Improvised-Men
author of Madeleine E. and The Natural Dissolution of Fleeting-Improvised-Men
“David Rice’s A Room in Dodge City warps the serial format to its own uncanny ends. It begins with a stranger arriving in a new town, but that’s the last conventional move in this spellbinding and cinematic novel. You’ll soon encounter toilet crucifixes, suicide students, and rock stars on vacation from being dead. Briskly paced with elegantly streamlined prose, the book follows its own impeccably strange and addictive dream logic.”
—Jeff Jackson,
author of Mira Corpora and Novi Sad
author of Mira Corpora and Novi Sad
“In A Room in Dodge City, David Rice has made good on the promise of the disturbing forays into the surrealism of everyday life that are his short stories. Dodge City is a walk on the dark side of the contemporary imagination that reworks the post-realist storytellings of Donald Barthelme or Henri Michaux into a voice that is unique. A Room in Dodge City is a picaresque novel for the age of the Darknet and Tor.”
—Simon Pummell,
director of Bodysong, Shock Head Soul, and Identicals
director of Bodysong, Shock Head Soul, and Identicals
About A Room in Dodge City
• Fiction: Novel-in-Vignettes
• Published by Alternating Current Press
• 5” x 8” Perfectbound Trade Paperback
• Cream Paper, 200 Pages
• Also Available in PDF, Mobi, and ePUB Digital Formats
• Print ISBN-13: 978-1-946580-00-9
• Print ISBN-10: 1-946580-00-7
• Digital ASIN: B06XR5ZPKK
• Digital eISBN: 1230001600841
• First Edition: February 7, 2017
• Interior Illustrations by Christina Collins
• Permalink | Short URL: tinyurl.com/roomindodge
• Request Review Copy
• Full Reviewer Press Kit [Requires preapproved login access; email us for login invitation.]
Images for public use for A Room in Dodge City
Click to view/download high-resolution front cover in: [PNG], [JPG], [PDF].
Click to view/download high-resolution full jacket in: [PNG], [JPG], [PDF].
Click here to view/download hi-resolution photo of author David Leo Rice by Sebastian Siadecki.
Click here to view/download hi-resolution photo of author David Leo Rice by Sebastian Siadecki.
Click here to view/download hi-resolution photo of author David Leo Rice by Sebastian Siadecki.
Click here to view/download hi-resolution photo of author David Leo Rice by Sebastian Siadecki.
Click here to view/download hi-resolution photo of illustrator Christina Collins by Rachael Conley.
Click here to view/download hi-resolution photo of illustrator Christina Collins by Rachael Conley.
Click here to view/download hi-resolution interior illustration by Christina Collins.
Click here to view/download hi-resolution interior illustration by Christina Collins.
Sneak Peek at A Room in Dodge City (Scroll inside box if blank.)
Reviews & mentions for A Room in Dodge City
Brian Evenson’s Most Anticipated Small Press Books of 2017
A Room in Dodge City was named on author Brian Evenson’s list of Most Anticipated Small Press Books of 2017, published on Big Other. Brian said, “This is a deeply odd book in all the best ways. It’s the kind of book that after you read it you wonder ‘What the hell just happened to me?’”
Winner of the Electric Book Award
A Room in Dodge City was the 2016 recipient of Alternating Current Press’ annual Electric Book Award, which honors the best unpublished manuscript of the year. The award and judges’ notes were announced on The Coil.
About author David Leo Rice
DAVID LEO RICE is a writer and animator from Northampton, Massachusetts, currently living in New York City. His stories have appeared in Black Clock, The Collagist, Birkensnake, Hobart, The Rumpus, The New Haven Review, Identity Theory, Nat. Brut, and elsewhere. This is his first novel. He has a B.A. in Esoteric Studies from Harvard University and can be found at raviddice.com and at @raviddice on Twitter.
About illustrator Christina Collins
CHRISTINA COLLINS is a writer, visual artist, and musician living in Minneapolis. She holds an MFA from the Rainier Writing Workshop and is a founding editor of Lockjaw Magazine and the author of Marrowlicker, forthcoming from Alternating Current Press. Find her at yourfriendchristina.com and at @xtinarc on Twitter.
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